Oracle Goes Live With Public Cloud Service

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The Oracle CEO devoted a significant portion of the presentation to demonstrating Oracle's social relationship management tools, based on software from Vitrue, a company Oracle is in the process of acquiring for an undisclosed sum.

Ellison is known for taking shots at competitors during keynote speeches, and SAP was particularly in his sights Wednesday. SAP, he claimed, won't have any cloud products until 2020 with the exception of SuccessFactors, the developer of cloud-based HCM applications SAP bought earlier this year for $3.4 billion. "They're not there. They've got nothing," Ellison said.

SAP, however, currently offers the Business ByDesign suite of cloud applications for mid-market companies, though SAP's chief cloud computing executive, Lars Dalgaard, has criticized the company's marketing efforts around the product. SAP also offers cloud versions of several enterprise applications, including SAP Financials OnDemand and SAP Sales OnDemand, and is in the process of acquiring e-commerce cloud application developer Ariba for $4.3 billion.

Ellison also criticized Workday, a competing vendor of cloud HCM applications, for developing its user interface in Flash and building the applications on an object data store rather than a database.

Oracle president Mark Hurd took the stage after Ellison to describe the Oracle Platinum Services, the new customer support services the company is offering for free -- as part of a standard support contract -- to owners of Oracle's Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster servers with Exadata, Sun ZFS or Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems.

"Oracle has changed the services game," Hurd said. "This is the highest level of support available in the industry today."

The new services include service-level agreements of a 5-minute response for Severity 1 issues, 15-minute restoration or escalation to development for Severity 1 issues, 24/7 fault monitoring by Oracle, and quarterly patching and system updates. Oracle, in a statement, said the new services "bridge the gap" between traditional IT support and fully managed services.